China Today - Home

Larry Herzberg has taught Chinese language and culture at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan for the past 25 years. His wife, Qin Xue Herzberg, is a native Chinese who grew up in Beijing and was educated at Beijing Normal University. For the past ten years she has also taught Chinese language and culture at Calvin College.

During the summers of 2005 and 2006, they traveled around China to find answers to the basic questions that have troubled their students about China for the past few decades, such as:
-Will China become a democracy any time soon?
-How severe and cruel is the so-called "one-child policy"?
-How much religious freedom is there really in China when there are so many “underground churches” and we hear about the persecution of church leaders? They also sought to discover what effect the tremendous economic growth of late in China has meant for the lives of individual Chinese people.

The couple conducted interviews with Chinese people from different walks of life, including college professors and other educators, free-thinking writers and intellectuals, marriage and family experts, and religious leaders, but also peasants and migrant workers and shop clerks. The film also features extensive video footage of daily life in China, a rising superpower in today's world.

The result is this 60-minute documentary film called "China Today: Issues that Trouble Americans at the Start of the 21st Century." Our hope is that this will correct some of the distorted impressions Americans have about contemporary China and lead to a greater understanding of life in the world's most populous country.

Watch Now

Click here to order a DVD Copy

DVD video approx. 63 minutes, 4:3 aspect ratio
Dolby Digital 2.0 English and Chinese audio, with English subtitles

©2008 Calvin Media Foundation